Thursday, March 16, 2006

"NOW IS THE TIME to reaffirm our roots as the party of fiscal discipline, beginning with the line-item veto," Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) told a Republican gathering in Memphis last weekend. "Bureaucrats in Washington," he said, are going to have to "tighten their belts," just like families. "No more hidden earmarks. No more mortgaging our children's future. No more bridges to nowhere. And no more runaway entitlement spending."

We thought this man was the Senate majority leader and had been for three years, but maybe we're mistaken -- maybe there are two Bill Frists out there. Memphis Bill, wooing the GOP faithful, just hates that runaway entitlement spending. Washington's Bill Frist, on the other hand, presided over Senate passage of the biggest increase in entitlement spending in decades, the Medicare prescription drug bill, calling it "an extraordinary day for seniors and indeed all Americans." Just this year, when President Bush called, however halfheartedly, for entitlement cuts totaling $65 billion over the next five years, where was Mr. Frist? The budget resolution pending in the Senate -- Mr. Frist's Senate -- ensures none of those cuts. Too bad Memphis Bill wasn't around; we haven't heard any complaints from Majority Leader Frist.

Too bad, also, that Memphis Bill was AWOL as the use of earmarks ballooned over the past three years. When Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) pitched a hissy fit on the Senate floor to salvage $453 million earmarked for his "bridges to nowhere," Leader Frist cheerfully obliged. A proposal to redirect some of that money to rebuild the Interstate 10 bridge across Lake Pontchartrain wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, went nowhere in Mr. Frist's Senate.

Naturally Mr. Frist is not the only Washington Republican suffering from this peculiar form of political amnesia. To hear party leaders bemoan out-of-control spending and the sad legacy of debt to grandchildren, you wouldn't have a clue that they've been in control of Congress as it jacked up spending and cut taxes. Somehow, though, Mr. Frist's sanctimony is particularly galling, and his finger-pointing at "bureaucrats in Washington" particularly offensive, as he prepares to run for president after years of running the Senate. Maybe he thinks those hicks back home in Tennessee -- or in Iowa and New Hampshire for that matter -- haven't been following the news.